Page 3 of Grin and Bear It

“You don’t need to apologise for existing,” my psych had said, so I didn’t. Instead, I looked at my watch and then nodded to June.

“I feel the same way,” I replied, “but the bell is about to go and I’m teaching first lesson. I’ve got to get some stuff photocopied before—”

“Of course.” The muscles around June’s mouth tightened. “We’ll talk about this in your performance review meeting next week.”

Fuck…

As I watched June stalk off on her perilously high heels, I cursed the Australian education system, and not for the first time. There were still a few old timers at the school. Teachers who had permanent positions, who drove up outside their classrooms as all the kids were waiting to go in, then strolled in poorly prepared, delivering some bullshit off-the-cuff lesson about nothing, using the curriculum as a guide on what not to teach. But because they had permanence, they faced no repercussions.

But me? I was still relatively new to the profession.

So, no security for me. I was valued because I was cheap (newer teachers were paid a lot less) and because I was potentially malleable due to having a chance at permanency as the carrot dangling in front of me.

And the possibility of not getting another contract was the stick right alongside it.

But I didn’t have the luxury of contemplating the future. I had to get ready for class. I pushed through the door into the staffroom, silently begging, pleading, with the gods of teaching that the line at the photocopier wasn’t ten people deep. As I bustled in, my colleagues looked up.

“You made it!” Steve said, with a grin. He was an older guy with a dad bod and a thick beard, but he was a good teacher. Not one of the old guard who were just waiting out their time till retirement.

“Shut up,” I hissed at him, then gave him a wry smile. “Please tell me the photocopier’s working. Please, please…”

“What happened to your head?”

Kate was a tall, athletic looking woman who did crazy shit like participate in triathlons in her spare time. She was also our year level’s science teacher.

“I got a lesson in physics from a shower head,” I said, slapping down my carefully constructed worksheet onto the glass screen of the photocopier.

“What are you talking about?” Kate peered at me more closely as though that would explain what I meant. I stabbed in my photocopier code on auto-pilot, selected the amount of copies I wanted, then punched the green ‘print’ button.

“The head of my shower popped off mid-way,” I explained as I stared at the flashing LCD panel on the photocopier. “Hit me in the head.”

“Do you need a plumber?” Steve asked. “I know a guy…”

Trouble was, the last guy he’d recommended had been older than my dad, wore pants that sagged halfway down his arse – the real plumber’s crack – and had leered at me while telling me he liked a girl with a bit of meat on her bones.

Ew.

“C’mon, c’mon, fuck you…” I punched the green button over and over in the way that never helps get the job done, but does defray the stress of dealing with recalcitrant machines.

“Photocopier’s fucked,” Meg announced as she strolled in the door, the smell of crisply printed paper wafting over. “And the line is epic in the main staffroom so don’t even think about it.”

I opened my mouth to answer, to wail something about my current predicament, when I heard the sound I really didn’t want to hear: the school bell. The subsequent muffled roar of students spilling into the school building told me everything I needed to know.

I’d sat up late, creating an example paragraph for kids to attack. The little buggers were savage with other people’s work, but I’d hoped to transform that vicious instinct into them developing a more measured critical eye—one that they could use when looking at their own work. The more they could see the issues with their own work, the less hours I’d have to spend peppering their drafts with a million bits of feedback. I’d planned this whole lesson around them working in groups (always popular with the kids, but also it was awesome because they often helped each other reach the conclusions I was hoping for, without my assistance) to tell me what I’d done wrong in my introduction.

And all of that was for naught. What’s more, I didn’t have a lesson ready and the kids were swarming down the hall.

“Miss!” My head whipped around as one of the boys in my morning class came running over. Trevor was the very epitome of golden retriever energy. He had that tall, gangly thing going on that comes when boys are still in that halfway place between boy and man, but he wove his way through the crowds, bouncing his basketball with ease as he came over.

Until I grabbed it from the air.

Without dropping everything I was carrying? Maybe my day was looking up.

Trevor’s eyes went wide. His basketball was his security blanket, his identity as one of the best players in the school put him in a sweet position in the student hierarchy, so I handed it back to him with a smile.

“No bouncing that in the hallway.”

“Yeah, right, sorry, Miss. So, Miss.” I shook my head at the rapid fire of words. “Are we watching a movie today? Please say we are watching a movie.” The ball was shoved between his knees as his hands slapped together in an attitude of prayer.

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